...New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood alleged that Charter, using its brand names of Time Warner Cable and later Spectrum, failed to provide the speedy internet service it promised customers. As a result of the settlement, over 700,000 active subscribers (người thuê bao) in New York will be paid $75 to $150 each for a total of $62.5 million in direct refunds (hoàn tiền, bồi thường). Additionally, 2.2 million active internet subscribers will receive free streaming services (dịch vụ phát video qua mạng miễn phí) and premium (cao cấp) channels from Charter valued at $100 million, according to Underwood's office.

"This settlement should serve as a wakeup call (lời thức tỉnh) to any company serving New York consumers: fulfill your promises, or pay the price," Underwood said in a statement. "Not only is this the largest-ever consumer payout by an internet service provider, returning tens of millions of dollars to New Yorkers who were ripped off and providing additional streaming and premium channels as restitution — but it also sets a new standard (đặt ra chuẩn mới) for how internet providers should fairly market their services."

...In 2008 President George W. Bush signed an agreement with Hanoi stipulating (quy định rằng) that Vietnamese refugees who entered the United States before 1995 (tỵ nạn đến mỹ trước năm 1995) would not be sent back to Vietnam (thì không bị trả về việt nam), even if they had committed crimes (kể cả phạm những tội) that normally would have led to deportation (lẽ ra phải bị trục xuất). Only those who entered after the 1995 normalization (chỉ sau bình thường hóa quan hệ ngoại giao năm 1995) of diplomatic relations — in other words, those who were clearly citizens of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam — were deportable.

Now the Trump administration is attempting to reinterpret (diễn giải lại) that agreement — and effectively erase (trên thực tế là xóa bỏ) the intimate history (lịch sử thân tình) of the Republic of Vietnam and the United States, countries linked by a brutal war (cuộc chiến khốc liệt) and promises of friendship (lời hứa hẹn của tình bằng hữu).

A brutal (đầy thú tính, cục súc; hung ác, tàn bạo) start to December has US markets on track for their worst final month of the year since 1931. The past three months have been particularly painful for investors, with the S&P 500, which touched (chạm) a 14-month low (thấp kỷ lục trong 14 tháng qua) on Monday, down nearly 12% over that time. The primary driver behind the sell-off was the notable rise (tăng đáng kể/đáng chú ý) in long-term interest rates (lãi suất dài hạn), he said.

To be sure, critics have viewed the former Fed chairman as having missed (bỏ qua, ko nhìn thấy) factors (các yếu tố) that contributed (góp phần) to the financial crisis (khủng hoảng tài chính). He wrote in a 2010 paper that he'd been "lulled (ru ngủ; tạm lắng (bão...), lặng sóng (biển...)) into a sense of complacency (tự mãn)."

Spain is currently embroiled (lôi kéo (ai) vào một cuộc xung đột, làm rối tung lên, làm rắc rối (vấn đề)) in tremendous (ghê gớm, khủng khiếp, dữ dội) debate (cuộc tranh luận) over who should pay the AJD tax, a tax on the creation of a mortgage (thế chấp mua nhà). Should the buyers (consumers) or the sellers of the mortgage (the banks) pay the tax? The Supreme Court, the President, and the legislature have all stepped in.

...What's amazing is that the Spanish uproar is over a decision that Econ 101 says does not make a whit's worth of difference to anything of importance. Whether the buyers send the check to the government or the sellers does not change the true incidence of the tax. As Tyler and I say in Modern Principles, "Who pays the tax does not depend on the laws of Congress but on the laws of supply and demand." The tax simply drives a wedge (cái nêm (để bổ gỗ, bửa đá, mở rộng một lỗ hổng hoặc giữ cho hai vật tách ra) between what the buyers pay and what the seller receives. Since sellers typically post prices, when the sellers must send the check the posted price will include the tax but the price the sellers receive will be the posted price minus the tax. If buyers must send the check to the government the posted price will not include the tax but the buyers will have to pay the posted price plus the tax. Either way, the seller, buyer, and government all end up net the same amount. It's little different than debating whether the right or left hand must pay the tax. See Tyler in the video below for the diagram and further details.

...Crime&tech’s software identifies not pizzo (protection payments) schemes as such, but firms that may be under mafioso control or involved in Mafia crimes such as illegal gambling and trafficking in people, drugs or arms. Its algorithms look at many variables. Businesses with little or no bank financing are more likely to have taken out a Mafia loan. Borrowers who struggle to repay may “convert the debt into stock” held by the Mafia creditor, often behind the smokescreen of a figurehead administrator, says Michele Riccardi of Crime&tech. The software considers the age and sex of a firm’s administrators. Those who are old, young or female are more likely to be figureheads.

It also looks for anomalies in payroll and invoice data that may reveal attempts to conceal illicit payments, especially in sectors where Mafia activity is strongest: construction, retail, waste removal, food services and transport. A high share of a firm’s wealth kept liquid is a red flag.

...In an effort to curb Mafia involvement in public contracts, Italy’s finance ministry is using the software to keep an eye on more than 10,000 bank accounts. Computer says no, mafioso.

I have a farm where people come to pick blueberries, and I charge $3 per pound. The problem is that people think it is an open buffet and eat a lot of blueberries while in the field, and then they come back to the payment station with just $3 worth of blueberries. Without being rude, how can I let them know that they are stealing?

—Michelle

I must admit that when I’ve picked blueberries I too ate a few in the process. It’s just so tempting that I think it’s inhuman to ask people not to eat any. So if we accept that people will eat some blueberries in the process of picking, maybe the best approach is to charge an entrance fee to cover the cost of the snacking. But make sure to call it an entrance fee and not a snacking fee—otherwise people will try to maximize their benefit by eating even more blueberries.

WAFFLE HOUSE, a breakfast chain from the American South, is better known for reliability than quality. All its restaurants stay open every hour of every day. After extreme weather, like floods, tornados and hurricanes, Waffle Houses are quick to reopen, even if they can only serve a limited menu. That makes them a remarkably reliable if informal barometer for weather damage.

...The index was invented by Craig Fugate, a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 2004 after a spate of hurricanes battered America’s east coast. “If a Waffle House is closed because there’s a disaster, it’s bad. We call it red. If they’re open but have a limited menu, that’s yellow,” he explained to NPR, America’s public radio network. Fully functioning restaurants mean that the Waffle House Index is shining green. The company is leaning into its reputation. On September 11th the company tweeted that the Waffle House Storm Centre “had been activated” and was monitoring Florence.

New Orleans lost over half its population after Hurricane Katrina—and 40% of its jobs.

Swiss Re, an insurance firm, estimates that global disasters inflicted $306bn in economic losses last year—almost twice the losses seen in 2016.

Nearly two-thirds of public firms in California have fewer than two female directors. Opponents of quotas say that this reflects the scarcity of women in upper management. A quota, they warn, would see boards being stuffed with inexperienced, token women. Another concern is that a small number of highly qualified women, known as “golden skirts”, would be stretched thinly across too many boards.

...Does any of this affect how well companies do? Some “snapshot” studies show that companies with more women on their boards have better returns and are less likely to be beset by fraud or shareholder battles. But causation is hard to prove. Studies comparing firms’ performance before and after quotas were introduced have been inconclusive. Some have found positive effects on firms’ results; others the opposite. One Italian study found an initial increase in stock price when female directors were elected to firms affected by the quota. But it found no effect on any of seven measures of firms’ performance, including profit, output, debt and return on assets. A French study offers one clue for why the addition of more women has not made a consistent difference. It concluded that the country’s new quota system led to changes in the way the boards made decisions. But there was no change in the substance of the decisions. It also found that the process did not change because the new members were women. It was because they were likely to be outsiders.

Monday, September 3, 2018

Wash Post: The world is on the brink of a historic milestone: By 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be “middle class,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas.

Kharas defines the middle class as people who have enough money to cover basics needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, and still have enough left over for a few luxuries, such as fancy food, a television, a motorbike, home improvements or higher education.

It’s a critical juncture: After thousands of years of most people on the planet living as serfs (nông nô), as slaves (nô lệ) or in other destitute (thiếu thốn, nghèo túng, cơ cực) scenarios (kịch bản, viễn cảnh, viễn tưởng), half the population now has the financial means to be able to do more than just try to survive.

“There was almost no middle class before the Industrial Revolution began in the 1830s,” Kharas said. “It was just royalty (hoàng gia) and peasants (nông dân). Now we are about to have a majority middle-class world.”

(Kharas’s definition of middle class takes into account differences in prices across countries.)

According to the World Values Survey (2015), people in countries with burgeoning middle classes do not feel that governments are responsible for their success, but rather that it is thrift (tiết kiệm, tằn tiện), hard work (lao động cần cù), determination (quyết tâm), and perseverance (bền chí) that count.

...Spreadsheet software redefined what it meant to be an accountant. Spreadsheets were once a literal thing: two-page spreads in a paper ledger. Fill them in, and make sure all the rows and columns add up. The output of several spreadsheets would then be the input for some larger, master spreadsheet. Making an alteration might require hours of work with a pencil, eraser, and desk calculator.

Once a computer programmer named Dan Bricklin came up with the idea of putting the piece of paper inside a computer, it is easy to see why digital spreadsheets caught on almost overnight.

But did the spreadsheet steal jobs? Yes and no. It certainly put a sudden end to a particular kind of task — the task of calculating, filling in, checking and correcting numbers on paper spreadsheets. National Public Radio’s Planet Money programme concluded that in the 35 years after Mr Bricklin’s VisiCalc was launched, the US lost 400,000 jobs for book-keepers and accounting clerks.

Meanwhile, 600,000 jobs appeared for other kinds of accountant. Accountancy had become cheaper and more powerful, so people demanded more of it.

What does a robot accountant look like? Not C-3PO with a pencil sharpener, that’s for sure. One might say that Microsoft Excel is a robot accounting clerk...

The company said in its announcement for the line that it hopes the chipped clothes and game will help create a “micro-community of brand ambassadors.” In essence, they’re rewarding you for wearing the products more often.

Sunday, July 29, 2018

When Facebook moves into its new offices in Mountain View this fall, a signature Silicon Valley perk will be missing — there won’t be a corporate cafeteria with free food for about 2,000 employees.

In an unusual move, the city barred companies from fully subsidizing meals inside the offices, which are part of the Village at San Antonio Center project, in an effort to promote nearby retailers. The project-specific requirement passed in 2014, attracting little notice because the offices were years away from opening.

It came in response to local restaurants that said Google, the city’s biggest employer, was hurting their businesses by providing free meals, according to John McAlister, a Mountain View councilman.

On Tuesday, the Santa Barbara City Council unanimously (nhất trí, đồng lòng) passed (thông qua) a bill (dự luật) that prohibits (ngăn cấm) restaurants (nhà hàng), bars, and other food service businesses from handing out plastic straws (ống hút bằng nhựa) to their customers (khách hàng). …Santa Barbara… has banned even compostable straws, permitting only drinking tubes made from nonplastic materials such as paper, metal, or bamboo. The city also has made a second violation* of its straw prohibition both an administrative infraction (sự vi phạm (luật, hiệp định...)) carrying a $100 fine and a misdemeanor (tội nhẹ, khinh tội), punishable by a maximum fine of $1,000 and up to six months in jail. Each contraband (buôn lậu) straw or unsolicited plastic stirrer counts as a separate violation, so fines and jail time could stack up quickly.

…Assistant City Attorney Scott Vincent tells me criminal charges would be pursued only after repeat violations and if there were aggravating circumstances.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Lesson one in our textbook chapter on managing incentives is “You get what you pay for (even when what you pay for is not exactly what you want)”. Case in point is the California cleanup of the 2017 wildfires, at $280,000 per site it’s four times more expensive than similar past cleanups and by far the costliest cleanup in CA history. The state emphasized speed and farmed the job out to the Army Corp of Engineers who hired contractors who were paid by the ton excavated! Paying by the ton created highly u̶n̶p̶r̶e̶d̶i̶c̶t̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ predictable consequences as KQED reports:

…Dan said he saw workers inflate their load weights with wet mud. Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore said he heard similar stories of subcontractors actually being directed to mix metal that should have been recycled into their loads to make them heavier.

“They [contractors] saw it as gold falling from the sky,” Dan said. “That is the biggest issue. They can’t pay tonnage on jobs like this and expect it to be done safely.”

…Krickl pointed to where his home used to stand. It’s a 6-foot deep depression that he affectionately called his “pond”.

That “pond” was created when contractors removed the foundation, soil and an entire concrete pad for Krickl’s garage, leaving behind a large hole.

Here’s my favorite part:

So many sites were over-excavated that the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services recently launched a new program to refill the holes left behind by Army Corps contractors. That’s estimated to cost another $3.5 million.

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

The price of vanilla has hit a record high (cao kỷ lục) of $600 (£445) per kilogram for the second time since 2017 when a cyclone (bão) damaged many of the plantations (vùng trồng) in Madagascar, where three quarters of the world’s vanilla is grown. Silver by comparison currently costs $538/kg.

Demand for vanilla has kept the prices high, leading some ice cream manufacturers to cut back and even halt production of the flavour (vị), sparking fears of shortages over the summer.

Replacement printer ink cartridges can cost between $8 and $27, depending on the type of printer you have. A single black ink jet cartridge (ống mực) from one major manufacturer can cost $23 for just 4ml of ink – enough to print around 200 pages.

Manufacturers argue they need to charge this to cover the loss they are selling the printer hardware at, together with the research and development they do on ink technology. But cut open an ink cartridge and you will see that most of the space inside is taken up with sponge (bọt biển, cao su xốp), designed to help preserve and deliver the ink.

And when you are paying what works out to be around $1,733/kg of ink, you might be better off printing with pure silver instead.

Many factors come into play at charity events. If you attend, you’re signaling that you’re part of a group and committed to its cause. But the social signaling doesn’t stop there. Numerous studies have shown that the more public people’s charitable behavior is, the more they donate. In a 1984 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Joel Brockner and his colleagues showed that people were more willing to donate to a charity when they were solicited in person compared with a phone call. So altruism no doubt motivates many donors—but social factors can boost their giving.

Imagine that you sell bread-making machines. Your task is complicated by the fact that most people have only a hazy grasp of what a bread-making machine does, let alone the joys and sorrows of owning one.

Nevertheless, there is a simple trick that will help these machines to fly off your shelves: next to what seems to be a perfectly adequate $150 bread-maker, place a $250 bread-maker with a long list of bewildering extra functions. Customers will think to themselves: “I don’t need all that nonsense. The cheaper, simpler bread maker is the better option.” Some of them will buy it, even though they would not have otherwise.

Mr Simonson and Tversky showed that when people are wavering between two options, you can change what they choose by offering a third, unattractive option. A $1,000 camera might seem extravagant unless there’s a $5,000 camera sitting next to it. The grande sized cup at Starbucks seems restrained when put next to the venti, a Brobdingnagian vat of flavoured warm milk.

...Thirty years ago, illicit retail drug transactions were characteristically carried out either in public locations (parks or street corners) or in dedicated drug-dealing locations (e.g., crack houses). Those locations tended to cluster heavily in low-income, high-crime urban neighborhoods where police had other priorities and neighbors were reluctant to call the police. Having to travel to such a location – risking arrest or robbery – constituted a significant barrier to illicit acquisition. Moreover, for open-air transactions, a buyer had to search for a willing seller–usually, a seller with whom he had an established connection – and that search took time (45 minutes was not uncommon) and sometimes failed entirely. Search time and risk constituted a second kind of “price” of illicit drugs, perhaps as significant (especially to new consumers) as the money price.

From the retailer’s point of view, that style of dealing meant exposure to both enforcement risk and the risk of robbery. It also greatly decreased the number of transactions a dealer could consummate in an hour, since most of his time was spent waiting for customers to arrive. Much of the retail price of illicit drugs represented compensation to the retail dealer for those risks and costs.

But with mobile phones, texting, and social media, transactions can now be arranged electronically and completed by home delivery, reducing the buyer’s risk and travel time to near zero and even his waiting time to minimal levels. In the recent Global Survey on Drugs, cocaine users around the world reported that their most recent cocaine order was delivered in less time, on average, than their most recent pizza order.

Friday, June 15, 2018

...Microsoft has placed a data center in the Scottish sea to determine whether it can save energy by cooling it in the sea. Data centers typically generate a lot of heat, and big providers try to move them to cooler countries to save on energy bills. Microsoft has been experimenting with subsea data centers for around five years, and previously sunk a data center on the Californian coast for five months back in 2015.

Today’s underwater data center will be deployed for five years, and includes 12 racks with 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage. That’s enough storage for around 5 million movies, and the data center is as powerful as thousands of high-end desktop PCs. The data center will be powered by an undersea cable and renewable energy from the Orkney Islands. The cable will also connect the servers back to the internet.

Saturday, May 26, 2018

Keep in mind that the U.S. is a relatively large buyer in many markets; in economic lingo, it has some monopsony (tình trạng độc mãi, thị trường một người mua) power. So if it cuts back purchases of, say, Chinese toys, China cannot simply reroute those now-surplus toys and sell them to Canada or Indonesia at the same price. This gives the U.S. significant (đáng kể) power in trade conflicts (xung đột thương mại). And China cannot throw around its weight as a buyer in similar fashion because it does not import on the same scale (quy mô).

The Chinese don’t have that many ready American targets (mục tiêu) for economic retaliation (trả đũa kinh tế). Aircraft (máy bay) are one of the major U.S. exports (hàng xuất khẩu) to China, where market demand (nhu cầu thị trường) for domestic flights (các chuyến bay nội địa) is rapidly growing. Beijing has a backlog (khối lượng đơn hàng) of about 400 orders (đơn đặt hàng) with the Boeing Co. It could try to switch some or all of those orders to Airbus SE, but that would mean delays (chậm giao hàng). Airbus would also know it could increase its prices and the Chinese would have to pay. As a buyer, China doesn’t have as much leverage in this market as it might appear.

The U.S. has many more targets when it comes to restricting foreign investment, as there is plenty of Chinese capital (vốn, tư bản) that would love to flee (đào thoát, bỏ chạy). The Chinese government already limits the activities of the big technology companies and many other U.S. multinationals in China, so they don’t have as many extra sticks in this regard.

The reality is China has margins for responding to the U.S., but they are mostly not in the economic realm.